Psychological safety at work: how leaders build it

Psychological safety at work is the shared belief that your team is safe for taking risks with each other. People can ask a question, admit a mistake or disagree without fear of being shamed or punished. Leaders build it with daily habits: asking for input, admitting their own errors, and responding calmly when bad news arrives.

What the term means

Amy Edmondson of Harvard introduced the idea of team psychological safety in a 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly. She defined it as a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Note the word "shared." It is not one person feeling relaxed. It is what the whole team believes about how it treats mistakes, questions and disagreement.

It also does not mean being nice all the time. Teams with high safety can still hold high standards and have hard talks. The difference is that people speak up early, while a problem is still small.

Sources: Amy Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 350 to 383.

What the research found

Edmondson studied 51 work teams in a manufacturing company. She found that team psychological safety was linked to learning behavior. Teams that felt safe asked for feedback, talked about errors and tried new ways of working. Learning behavior, in turn, was linked to better team performance.

Google reached a similar view in its own research. Its Project Aristotle studied 180 teams: 115 engineering project teams and 65 sales teams. Team sizes ranged from 3 to 50 people, with a median of 9. Google looked at five dynamics of effective teams. It named psychological safety as the first.

The five dynamics are:

Psychological safety: can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Mutual trust: can we count on each other to do quality work on time?
Structure and clarity: are roles, plans and goals clear?
Meaning of work: is the work personally important to each of us?
Impact: do we believe our work matters?

Sources: Edmondson (1999), as above. Google re:Work, "Guide: Understand team effectiveness" (rework.withgoogle.com), on Project Aristotle and the five dynamics.

Signs it is missing

You cannot fix what you cannot see. Watch for these signals in your own team:

Meetings are quiet until the boss speaks, and then everyone agrees.
Bad news reaches you late, or only through someone else.
People hide mistakes or blame others when something goes wrong.
Few questions are asked, and new ideas rarely come from junior staff.
The same two or three people do all the talking.

In many workplaces across Asia, respect for seniority is a strength. It can also make it hard for a junior person to disagree with a senior one in public. Leaders in these settings need to make speaking up easy on purpose. Silence does not mean agreement.

Six habits that build it

Google's guide suggests that managers ask the team for input and ideas. It also suggests telling the team how you like to work and inviting others to share their own preferences. It also lists steps leaders can take: frame the work as a learning problem, acknowledge your own fallibility, and model curiosity by asking lots of questions. Here is how to turn that into daily practice.

Go first. Say "I got this wrong, and here is what I learned." When the leader admits an error, it becomes normal for others to do so.
Ask real questions. End meetings with "What are we missing?" or "Who sees this differently?" Then wait. Count to ten in your head before you fill the silence.
Invite the quiet people. Ask each person for a view in turn. Some people need to be asked, or they will not speak.
Thank people for bad news. If someone brings you a problem and you react with anger, you will not hear the next one. Say thank you first. Solve it second.
Treat failures as data. After a miss, ask what happened and what the team can change. Ask about the process before you ask about the person.
Share your working style. Tell people how you like to get updates and how you prefer to hear disagreement. Ask them to do the same.

Sources: Google re:Work, "Guide: Understand team effectiveness," section on fostering effective team behaviors (rework.withgoogle.com).

How to check where your team stands

You can measure this with a short, anonymous survey. Google's guide offers statements for team members to rate, such as these:

If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

Collect the answers without names. Share the combined result with the team, and talk about it together. Pick one or two changes, put a date on them, and ask again in a few months. If the scores do not move, your habits have probably not changed yet.

The same guide groups the questions under the five dynamics, so you can see whether safety is the weak spot or whether trust, clarity or purpose needs more work.

Sources: Google re:Work, "Guide: Understand team effectiveness," team survey and discussion materials (rework.withgoogle.com).

A simple plan for this month

Do not try everything at once. Pick two habits and practise them for four weeks.

Week one: in your next team meeting, admit one mistake of your own.
Week two: ask each person for one idea or concern before you decide.
Week three: thank the next person who brings you bad news, in front of the team.
Week four: run the short survey and share what you learned.

Trust grows slowly and breaks fast. One angry reaction can undo weeks of effort. If you slip, say so, and try again.

This article is general information about team management, not professional or medical advice.

Sources

Edmondson, A. (1999). "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams." Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350 to 383.
Google re:Work. "Guide: Understand team effectiveness." rework.withgoogle.com.